Guy Maestri
Art & Australia Vol.46 No.3
Margaret Farmer
Revelling in paint's materiality, Guy Maestri creates abstract gestures of colour and line supplement by a figurative lexicon expressive of environmental concerns. The 2008 works that comprised his Sydney show 'Natural Selection' were large, brightly coloured and heavily inscribed with his figuration, extending it with symbols of drought.
In Natural Selection, Maestri juxtaposes motifs of indigenous and introduced species - of kangaroo, ram's horns and jawbone - in black and white. In Bone Storm (Drought) the repeated jawbone reads as a veil of white death over black land; again, a white skein of death traverses Cracked Earth. The sculptural works - vehicles rendered on whale teeth, and bronze cane toads - were single notes.
The exhibition was dominated by restless energy. The topmost layer of Turf Wars V is a large pink scrawl and is it only with discipline that the eye is able to discern the ram's head motif - the plastic pink is so lacking in force against the tumult behind it. In Lantana, the trope is similarly prominent yet obscure; this time in baby-boy blue. Among the loose stencil-like motifs, a pen sketch of the head and paws of a dog reclined in the enjoyment of a belly scratch takes on a delicate tenderness. Humbler is the Night Trees series, a sombre palette and more restrined content allowing for some sense of mood and of place to develop. The sunny Welshmans Reef is also more successful in this way, for its compositional scrubbiness.
Overall, the exhibition gave me the impression of first rather than wrought thoughts; of impressionistic responses to land rather than the evocations or expressions of a relationship to place that would make a landscape; of a hedoinistic approach to painting rather than of more serious engagement.
Guy Maestri, Natural Selection, Tim Olsen Gallery, 21 October - 9 November 2008.